Randy’s Blog

It's been a while since I've written about my Big 12 Sports river. It's still there, churning away, updating every hour or so with all the latest headlines about all things Big 12. I still check it daily. Most days I just skim the headlines to get a sense of what's going on. Sometimes a story will jump out at me, and I'll click the headline to read the story. And once in a great while, a story is so interesting that I'll send it to Wendy.

When I created the river (way back here and here), it occurred to me I didn't have any way to monitor the various RSS feeds that are used to pull the headlines. If something stopped working, I would never know, unless I actively went looking for problems. At the time, I decided to let the issue slide. It was a lot of work to create the river, and I was ready to take a break from working on it.

A few months ago, as the college football season was getting into full swing, I noticed I wasn't getting as many headlines as I had in previous seasons. So one weekend I decided to write a program to help me monitor problems. What I came up with was a program that sends me an email once a week, summarizing the daily number of posts from each RSS feed for the previous week. It looks like this:

I also added another table, which shows the most recent response code from each website's server:

Between the two tables, I can get a quick sense of what's going on. And having it emailed to me each week means I don't have to do anything! Just a quick glance at the email each week tells me if anything's wrong.

After creating this program, and running it for the first time, it was clear several things were wrong. After a bit of investigation I learned some things had changed in the 2 years since I created the river:

• In West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette and the Charleston Daily Mail newspapers merged into the Charleston Gazette-Mail. For me, this meant 2 RSS feeds were combined into 1 new feed.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette seems to have stopped covering West Virginia sports entirely.
• The Austin American-Statesman seems to have dropped support for RSS feeds. This was mildly disappointing, but I'm not too sad that there are fewer Texas stories in the river.
• Five or six other websites changed the URL for their RSS feed, probably because they redesigned their website.

I fixed all of these issues and immediately noticed a lot more content in the river. It felt much better, like it had when I first created it.

Writing this program paid off the very next week, when I got my first automated weekly email. I immediately noticed two things:

The Topeka Capital-Journal had returned a "404 - Not Found" status for its Kansas and K-State feeds, and no posts had been recorded for either since the previous Tuesday. When I investigated the cause, I discovered the newspaper had changed the URL for both feeds the previous week. I updated the river with the new URLs, and everything was back to working.

I was extremely pleased that my new monitoring program paid off so quickly! 

So I think the lesson here is that many times, writing software is not enough. It helps to write software that monitors your software, and makes it almost effortless to keep tabs on how things are working.

I wrote about Leonard Cohen's new album, You Want It Darker, in a recent post. Just a few weeks after the album was released, he passed away at the age of 82. It wasn't too much of a surprise; he'd said his health was declining. But it was still a shock to see the headlines announcing his death. 

I'm so glad he was able to finish his last album. It's really good! It's my favorite of the albums he released this decade. I've embedded a couple of songs from it below. It was hard to limit myself to just two!

Note that if you're reading this via email, you may have to open this post in a browser to see them.

If I Didn't Have Your Love

On the Level

I hope you enjoy them as much I do!

It worked!

This morning I got an email like this:

Subject: Little Debbie Notifier: Cherry Cordials
Message:
Miles Store Name Address
0.66 Jewel 4222 Elm St Mchenry, IL 60050
7.11 Jewel 2401 Route 12 Spring Grove, IL 60081

Just like last time, they were not with the other Little Debbie snacks, but down the frozen food aisle in a special display of holiday treats.

This was the first such email I've gotten since around February, when cherry cordials went out of stock in my area. They're only available for a limited time during the holiday season, and they're delicious!

If you want to find out if they're available near you, you can search for Little Debbie snacks here.

The funny thing is that 2 nights ago I dreamed I found cherry cordials in a grocery store! My subconscious must have been tuned in to the local Little Debbie supplier.

Even if we hadn't watched Game 7 of the World Series, we would have known what happened. Around midnight on Wednesday, people started setting off fireworks in our neighborhood. That was true for pretty much every neighborhood, based on similar reports of coworkers. Evanston, IL actually set off their emergency sirens when the Cubs won.

We've been watching the Cubs throughout the postseason. It was crazy and historic to see them win. I can't imagine what lifelong Cubs fans must feel.

Dave Winer, the guy who invented blogs and has been blogging since the mid-90s, is a Mets fan. He blogged yesterday about trying to figure out if he's ever experienced anything close to what lifelong Cubs fans must be feeling. He decided he probably has, and created this:

If you made a list of all the things that could happen to increase the drama of the Cubs winning the World Series, many of them actually happened:

• Falling behind 3 games to 1
• Rallying to force a game 7
  
• Playing game 7 on the road
  
• Blowing a big lead late
  
• Going into extra innings
  
• Having a rain delay
  
• Allowing the other team to score in the bottom of the 10th
  

It's craziness. The parade was today and there were a lot fewer people at work than normal.

I can't imagine what Cleveland fans are feeling, either, but I can't help but think: thank goodness they won the NBA title this year. Otherwise, they would have lost the NBA Finals and a World Series in the same year, and their championship drought for any major sport would have continued.

Anyway, go Cubs!

Wendy and I have been big fans of Leonard Cohen, a Canadian poet/singer/songwriter, since our Colorado days, when Wendy first heard of him. He released a new album on Friday, You Want It Darker, at the age of 82! We've been looking forward to it since it was announced a couple months ago. This is his 3rd album this decade, which is an impressive feat. One of my coworkers said Cohen is a big inspiration to him on what you can accomplish later in life.

I think we started with a "Best of" Cohen album when we lived in Colorado, and then got a "More Best of" album. Over the years we've slowly collected all of his albums, and realized he has so many incredible songs, there's no way a "Best of" compilation can do justice to his work.

To go along with the new album, the New Yorker published a really long and interesting profile of him last week: Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker.

I almost never hear his songs on the radio. They tend to be deep meditations on love, death and religion, so they're not like typical mainstream music. Odds are, though, you've heard a cover of one his songs, Hallelujah:

During a book sale this summer, I picked up a copy of a graphic novel called The Sign of the Black Rock:

It looked like it was for kids, but I said what the heck and bought it anyway. I like graphic novels, and it was only a quarter, so I had nothing to lose. Recently I got around to reading it, figuring it would be a quick read and I could toss it in the donation pile when I was done.

But when I was done, I didn't want to get rid of it! It was really good. The art was great, the writing was even better, and the flow of action from panel to panel was superb. I've read a lot of graphic novels over the years, and there are lots of mediocre ones out there. When I come across a great one, it really sticks out.

So instead of getting rid of it, I looked up more about it, and about the author. It was the second of seven books in the Three Thieves series, written and drawn by Scott Chantler. I'd never heard of it before, but as luck would have it, the seventh book was just published this month! I collected the rest of the series and read them all in order, start to finish:

They are all excellent. The series is an "all-ages fantasy adventure" and has won several awards. I was most impressed with how well written it was. He put a lot of work into it!

I discovered his blog recently, and subscribed to it. What's interesting is that he's written about how he markets all of his work more like a book than a comic or graphic novel. As he puts it, he uses "content rather than form as a point of entry for people." He starts by making sure he creates a story that appeals to everyone, and then he attends writer's groups and book festivals and talks about his work. He sells more at book festivals than he does at comic conventions. Because of this approach, he gets fan mail from 80-year-olds.

There are a couple of other graphic novels he's written. One is called Two Generals, and is "about World War II, honouring a deceased relative, and personal family history." It was nominated for a bunch of awards. The other is called Northwest Passage, but oddly I couldn't find much about it on his website despite it also being nominated for awards. I haven't read either of these, but plan on checking them out soon.

Not bad for what looked like a kid's book at first glance!

A long time ago, I had a tattered, worn out copy of a book called "Strange Energies, Hidden Powers":

There was a chapter about pyramids and all the strange phenomena associated with them. Supposedly fruit lasted longer and razor blades got sharper inside a pyramid-shaped object. There was all sorts of other stuff I don't remember. But it made me curious, so I decided to run an experiment at the time. I made a small pyramid out of cardboard, and put the old razor I'd been shaving with inside. After several days, I took it out and shaved with it. My first thought was that it really was sharper! My second thought was that I really had no objective way to test the sharpness, so it might just be wishful thinking. Thus the result of my experiment was inconclusive.

Fast forward to earlier this year. I saw an article online about a "gold pyramid in Illinois". I'd never heard of it, and I thought it couldn't possibly be real, but I read the article anyway. And it turned out to be a real thing! In 1977, a pyramid-crazed man built a house for his family in the shape of a pyramid, and later had it plated in gold sheets. It became such a local sensation that he started offering tours of his house. I looked up where it was, and discovered it was only about 40 minutes from where we live! Crazy! I couldn't believe we'd lived here over 10 years and never heard about this before.

So I added it to the top of my to-do list, and when it was time for my birthday, I decided we should go check it out. I really didn't know what to expect, so I set my expectations fairly low. Most of the tour was actually a presentation by the son of the guy who built the house, and it turned out to be really entertaining. He talked about what it was like growing up with a pyramid-obsessed father and all the benefits and challenges they've had over the years with such an unusual house.

They also have a 3-pyramid, 4-car garage. And yes, they have a moat in front of their house (more on that later):

Even the fireplace is pyramid shaped!

The house has six floors. The first floor has a conference room and all sorts of Egyptian-themed artifacts:

There are several interesting things that happened to the family:

In the 1980's, after the house became a big sensation, the tourism branch of the Egyptian government got wind of it, called them, and said "You're getting a lot of people interested in Egypt. Why don't you start selling tours to Egypt?" So they did, and they sold a lot of them. The family got to go to Egypt a number of times, and eventually they sold so many tours that the Egyptian government allowed the family to go on a special behind-the-scenes tour where they got to see artifacts the public isn't allowed to see.

During one of the trips, the pyramid-obsessed father saw a large statue of King Ramses II, and decided he wanted one just like it. So he had one built:

It's 55 feet tall! There's an airport in a nearby town and apparently pilots really like the statue, because it's oriented due west, so it's easy to get their bearings from it.

The other crazy thing is that shortly after it was built, a natural spring appeared directly underneath their house. He said that in mythology, pyramids attract water. (I haven't tried to verify that yet.) So they rerouted some of the water and now they have a big pond for a backyard and a moat around their house. They also learned the spring water was drinkable, and due to popular demand, they've started bottling and selling it as Gold Pyramid Water.

I bought a few bottles (which are themselves shaped like pyramids), and it was pretty good. Normally I don't like water to have a taste. Their water did have a taste, but it was a good one. Apparently sometime next year it will be available to purchase in stores.

The guy did talk about some of the mysterious pyramid-power claims. He seemed to strike a good balance of not believing all the crazy claims, but also not taking history books and mainstream science as unshakable truth. 

So it was worth the trip in my opinion.

Every so often, when I see something interesting, I'll pull out my phone and take a picture. But then I promptly forget about it, and over time those one-off photos get drowned out amidst all the vacation pictures in my photo collection. So I've rescued a few of them from obscurity and assembled them below.

This photo is looking directly underneath my bird feeder. A bird and rabbit were sharing the bounty of seeds that had fallen to the ground:

Another photo underneath the bird feeder. This time a rabbit was just chillaxing in the yard:

A full moon rising over the nearby pond:

Our neighbors have fake deer in their yard. One evening as Wendy and I headed out for a walk, we noticed two real deer cautiously approaching the fake ones. They seemed a bit confused by their motionless comrades:

Last winter I noticed a huge bird on the fence in our back yard! I thought it was an owl at first, but after we looked at it through binoculars, we decided it was a red-tailed hawk. It sat there for at least 15-20 minutes. I wish you could see it more clearly, but this was the most my phone's camera would zoom in:

During a walk last fall, I was amazed at how many geese were in the pond, and how loud they were. I recorded a video, but by the time it started recording, the geese had begun to fly away. You can still see a lot of them, though:

Finally, these aren't random one-time photos, but I saw them in my collection and I don't think I ever shared them. Last fall we went to the Morton Arboretum to see the fall colors. When we got there, we discovered they were displaying a series of extremely impressive Lego sculptures. I took more pictures of Legos than I did of trees! Here are some of the most impressive ones:

We took a much-needed trip to Sam's today, to stock up on items. I dutifully made a list of everything we needed, but then I forgot to bring the list. Bummer! We managed to remember almost everything, but we forgot the pine nuts. Oh well.

While we were there, we bought a giant book of word search puzzles, on impulse:

As you can see, it has over 375 puzzles, so it should last a while. This afternoon I flipped it open and solved a random puzzle. Its theme was "Chess Terms" and there were 29 different chess-related words or phrases. I was surprised how many terms I'd never heard before. Some didn't even sound like words! So I did a bit of research to see what they meant. Here's a partial list:

Closed File: A column on a chessboard containing black and white pawns. It is, therefore, not good for rooks or queens.

En Prise: French for "in take", referring to a piece that can be captured by the opponent.

Fianchetto: A bishop positioned on a long diagonal of the board, such as directly above the knight (after moving the knight's pawn out of the way).

Fide: An acronym for the World Chess Federation: Fédération internationale des échecs.

Fool's Mate: The fastest possible checkmate, aka "two-move checkmate".

Ja'Doube: French for "I adjust". Saying this phrase indicates you're going to adjust a piece (by centering it in the square), not move it.

Skewer: A tactic where a valuable piece is attacked and forced to move away, allowing the piece behind it to be captured. Apparently it's also called the X-ray attack.

Swindle: When a player in a losing position manages to trick his opponent and pull out a win or draw.

Woodpusher: A weak player who moves pieces without any plan.

Zugzwang: German for "compulsion to move". When a player is forced to make a move that worsens his position.

There was also a 30th "mystery word", which had 8 characters but it was up to you to find. I looked for a while, but I kept thinking what if it's another outlandish word like zugzwang? So I gave up and looked in the back of the book. Turns out it was "castling", which seemed so obvious in hindsight. Once I knew what it was, I found it right away.

Apparently my knowledge of chess is not as strong as I thought.

My multi-year quest has ended. Last night, I watched the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a two-part episode titled "All Good Things...". I'd never seen it before, nor heard anything about it. But it was remarkably good and very dramatic. It wasn't just a great end to the series, it was one of the best episodes of the entire series. I'm amazed they were able to pull that off. I was a little sad when the episode started, knowing that this was it. No more adventures with Captain Picard and the crew, once it was over.

I've seen several TV shows where the final episode turns into a retrospective, with clips from past episodes. Thankfully, they didn't do that. There was a bit of looking to the past, but there was also a lot of looking forward, where we see one possible future of what happens to the characters. I thought that was a bold move by the writers, and I loved it. One of the highlights for me was seeing Data 25 years in the future. We're shown Data's house, and we see that he owns dozens of cats, who are seemingly draped everywhere. It was a subtle and fun joke.

Several months ago Wendy read an article that mentioned what the final line in this episode was. I asked her not to tell me; I didn't want to be spoiled. I had a few guesses what it might be, but I was totally surprised. Not what I thought at all. It's a great line, spoken by Picard, as he's doing something he's never done before. What a great ending. I will miss the show.

In other Star Trek news, a couple of weeks ago Wendy went to her piano class, and her teacher excitedly said "Wendy! Did you know that if you have Amazon Prime, you can watch all 7 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation?" Wendy laughed and said she knew all about it, and then explained my quest. Later, her teacher said "Maybe after I finish The Next Generation, I'll watch Deep Space Nine!" I have so much respect for Wendy's piano teacher now.

I've heard lots of good things about Deep Space Nine, so I think I'll have to watch it next. But I might take a short break first.